jason (r) andersonhttp://www.jasonranderson.com
The Cynical ChristianMon, 13 Aug 2018 11:46:50 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8The Cynical Christianjason (r) andersonjason (r) andersonjaceanderson@gmail.comjaceanderson@gmail.com (jason (r) anderson)The Cynical Christianjason (r) andersonhttp://www.jasonranderson.com/wp-content/uploads/powerpress/chrisandjason.jpghttp://www.jasonranderson.com
58453248The Value of Door-to-Door Canvassinghttp://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/08/the-value-of-door-to-door-canvassing/
http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/08/the-value-of-door-to-door-canvassing/#respondMon, 13 Aug 2018 03:13:43 +0000http://www.jasonranderson.com/?p=4482So, yesterday I’m in the bedroom trying to figure out how to make our TV work better (“Stupid TV! Be more funny!“). Because when you cut out cable, it doesn’t cut out your craving for a steady stream of sweet, sweet televised media, even if it’s only Family Ties reruns and X-Games highlights, and you have to hang an antenna More ...

]]>So, yesterday I’m in the bedroom trying to figure out how to make our TV work better (“Stupid TV! Be more funny!“). Because when you cut out cable, it doesn’t cut out your craving for a steady stream of sweet, sweet televised media, even if it’s only Family Ties reruns and X-Games highlights, and you have to hang an antenna out your window to get them.

My six-year-old son comes running in and says, “Dad, there’s a ding-dong at the door!” He meant someone had rung the doorbell, but little did I know how accurately he was also describing the bell ringer.

By the time I got to the door, my wife had already opened it and was engaged in conversation with a campaign volunteer who was canvassing for Jenn Gray, a candidate for Alabama’s state House of Representatives. The volunteer was a middle-aged lady with salt-and-pepper hair and a definite Whole-Foods-frequent-shopper-club vibe. Any question about where she or her candidate were coming from was answered immediately by the “blue dot in a red state” pin on her collar, announcing to all that she was set apart from all the ignorant straight-ticket Republican voters in the state by being a super-enlightened straight-ticket Democratic voter.

Now I admit, I may have a tendency to jump to conclusions and make assumptions about people based on little tells like that. So I hereby apologize to everyone who has one of those “blue dot” bumper stickers who’s not a self-righteous jackass. However, this particular blue dot did everything in her power to convince me of the accuracy of my assumptions.

Bear in mind, this visit was happening right at lunchtime, and our kids are climbing all over my wife and me begging for food, Oliver Twist-style: “Please, good sirrah and madam, might we trouble you for a luke-warm corndog, or perhaps a mouthful of tortilla chips?” Actually there was probably more screaming than that.

But ignoring all that, and every polite body language signal we could think of for “Go away,” our canvasser bore right in, listing for us, repeatedly, all the reasons we should vote for her candidate. These all boiled down to variations on one of two themes: 1) She’s against “all that corruption,” which is really a bold stance considering all the success of candidates who come out in favor of corruption. And, 2) most importantly, she is a smarty-smart-smart-smartypants. She has a chemistry degree! Which, as we all know, is the number one requirement for a good legislator, considering how much they have to deal with spectroscopy and carbon dating and whatnot.

And so she continued, at length, to emphasize how smart her candidate was, and how smart she was for supporting her candidate, and how much smarter they were than all those dummies on the other side. She was the perfect stereotype of the liberal political activist: utterly certain of her intellectual superiority, utterly disconnected from her audience, and oblivious to any social cues that she might not be winning us over.

But here’s where the effectiveness of her visit comes in. At one point in her long (have I mentioned that she wouldn’t stop?) presentation, she asked if we knew the name of our current representative in the state house. We admitted that we did not. She nodded sagely and said, “See? That’s how you know he’s not doing a good job.”

Well, no, I thought. That’s how I know he’s doing a very good job of staying the bleep out of my life. If every politician were doing such a good job, I would be a happy man indeed.

She then informed us that the incumbent’s name is Dickie Drake. And in a flash, I went from not knowing anything about him to being the biggest Dickie Drake fan in the world. There is now no force on earth that could keep me from voting for Dickie Drake this November. I would literally crawl naked over broken glass from my house to the polling place to cast my ballot for him.

So you see, good, old-fashioned door knocking really can make a difference in elections. Thank you, canvasser lady, for educating me on our state’s desperate need for me to cancel out your vote.

]]>http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/08/the-value-of-door-to-door-canvassing/feed/04482Are People Who Don’t Know Trump Better at Analyzing Him?http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/07/are-people-who-dont-know-trump-better-at-analyzing-him/
http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/07/are-people-who-dont-know-trump-better-at-analyzing-him/#respondSun, 08 Jul 2018 19:27:29 +0000http://www.jasonranderson.com/?p=4365You know that guy in your hometown who’s a complete schmuck? Maybe he’s a bigwig in local politics, or the church, or the business community. But whatever he does, he’s a notorious loudmouth and self-promoter. You’d like to just avoid him, but he makes a point of insinuating himself into the middle of every event, and if he’s not there, More ...

]]>You know that guy in your hometown who’s a complete schmuck? Maybe he’s a bigwig in local politics, or the church, or the business community. But whatever he does, he’s a notorious loudmouth and self-promoter. You’d like to just avoid him, but he makes a point of insinuating himself into the middle of every event, and if he’s not there, he does something to make sure people are talking about him. Every town has one. You probably know exactly the kind of guy I’m talking about and are thinking about your own local schmuck right now. (Note: this person may sometimes be a woman.)

Imagine how you would feel if this guy rose to national prominence. If, in fact, he achieved a position where people had to treat him like exactly as big a big shot as he always thought he was. It would be kind of galling, wouldn’t it? Even if he was moderately successful in his position, it would be hard to see him as anything other than that schmuck you knew from your hometown.

Donald Trump’s been famous for a long time, but to me and I daresay to most of the people who live outside of New York City, he just lived on the periphery of fame. I knew he was a rich guy, he built buildings, he owned a team in the USFL, and he was on TV sometimes. That’s about it.

But to people from New York, Trump was that hometown schmuck. He was in the local paper all the time. He was on local TV all the time. He was hanging his name in thirty-foot-high letters on buildings all over town.

So people from New York developed very strong opinions about Trump. A lot of those people went on to careers in broadcasting and journalism and other forms of political moving and shaking. And now they’re forced to watch their hometown schmuck walking around as President of the United States.

You can’t help but wonder if this has an influence on the analysis of analysts who are from New York or who have spent a goodly portion of the last forty years in the greater New York area. Trump is doing a lot of things that should make conservative pundits happy, and yet there are so many conservative pundits who can’t bring themselves to mention that. And if they do, it’s usually presented as a side note in a long exposition on Trump’s buffoonery and prevarication.

I’m sure the people who are familiar with Trump have plenty of reasons to dislike him. I’m not disputing anything said about his character. He made his fortune in New York real estate, for crying out loud. I’m sure he’s got more skeletons in his closet than a kleptomaniac paleontology enthusiast.

But I’m just a schmuck from Alabama, and I can look around and see that all the prophecies of doom (DOOM!) under the reign of Trump have not come to fruition. In fact, things seem to be going pretty good. The fact that conservative pundits can’t bear to acknowledge it more vociferously makes me think that their perspective is clouded by something more personal than political.

]]>http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/07/are-people-who-dont-know-trump-better-at-analyzing-him/feed/04365Life Lessons I Learned on Our Summer Vacationhttp://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/07/life-lessons-learned-summer-vacation/
http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/07/life-lessons-learned-summer-vacation/#respondThu, 05 Jul 2018 03:55:50 +0000http://www.jasonranderson.com/?p=4379We’re just back from the big Anderson family trip to the beach, and now we’re into the recovery phase of vacation; washing all the swimsuits, putting away our gathered seashells, and processing the memories. And as we were taught in that great movie Meatballs, what’s a summer vacation for if you can’t bring back a few life lessons? — Worthless More ...

]]>We’re just back from the big Anderson family trip to the beach, and now we’re into the recovery phase of vacation; washing all the swimsuits, putting away our gathered seashells, and processing the memories. And as we were taught in that great movie Meatballs, what’s a summer vacation for if you can’t bring back a few life lessons?

— Worthless souvenir stores are not actually worthless: To you it’s a dingy mess of copyright-violating logo t-shirts and wind chimes made out of coconuts, but to your kids it’s a dadgum wonderland. Our kids mentioned the souvenir stores over and over as something they were specifically looking forward to, and they were not disappointed. If they can run around for a couple of hours being amazed by the cornucopia of stuff and all it costs me is the price of a couple of tchotchkes, it’s money well spent.

— It’s good to have people in your life who can worry about you without acting like they’re worried about you: My son is at that most dangerous stage of learning to swim — he thinks he is a better swimmer than he is. The trick as a parent is to be ready to help him — to watch him intently and worry about him — without infecting him with my fear and diluting his courage in the water. It ain’t easy. But if I can pull it off, he has the freedom to jump into the pool with blissful reckless abandon. One day he’ll have to learn all about the dangers that make me worry, but I’m glad I can put that day off for a little while.

— Morgan Freeman likes to golf: So I go to play golf at a course near the beach, and as I’m on the practice green getting ready for my round, I notice an older black gentleman putting a few yards away from me. Out of the corner of my eye, I think he looks like Bill Russell, but that’s silly; what would Bill Russell be doing here? I walk over to the starter to see if the first tee is open, and he says, “You know the actor Morgan Freeman?” Yes, I say. He tilts his head toward the white-bearded black man and says, “That’s him.” I look straight at the guy for the first time, and by golly, that’s Morgan Freeman. Apparently he goes to that course all the time. Everybody says he’s a nice guy.

— Sometimes your memories of how good something was are exactly right: Good experiences often get blown up in your memory, getting better and better as time goes on. But sometimes, it really was as good as you remember. On a previous trip to the beach a few years back, we went to a local restaurant and my wife had a banana leaf wrapped fish entree. When she tasted it, she acted like it was the best food she had ever put in her mouth. Then she gave me a bite, and all at once I understood the true meaning of joy as all light and life converged in a morsel of buttery flakiness. Then we went back to the same place and had the same dish this year. It really was that good.

— There is absolutely no substitute for grandparents: My advice is to marry someone who has great parents, because they will be great grandparents (and probably great great-grandparents, etc.). Then go on vacation with them and enjoy watching them love your kids. And then take advantage of their babysitting so you and your wife can go out and get some mind-blowing banana leaf wrapped fish.

— Kids are lenses that focus the fun parts of life for old eyes: When you have kids, you discover that all kinds of things you thought were boring and predictable are really amazing. Elevators, sand, garbage chutes (“Where does it go?!?!”), Sprite, cheap souvenirs, and tourist maps are just a few of the things that brought us outsized delight on this trip. There is so much that I would take for granted if I didn’t have them to show me how wonderful it all really is, on vacation and every other day, really. If you want your vacation to be bigger, make sure you take some kids. If you don’t have your own, try to rent some when you get there.

]]>http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/07/life-lessons-learned-summer-vacation/feed/04379Colonel Nicholson Conservativeshttp://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/05/colonel-nicholson-conservatives/
http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/05/colonel-nicholson-conservatives/#respondSat, 26 May 2018 19:50:17 +0000http://www.jasonranderson.com/?p=4296We’re well into year two of the Trump presidency, and well past the time when any lingering intramural hard feelings on the conservative side should’ve been smoothed over. That’s how it normally goes — egos get punctured in the primaries, expectations get modified based on who the actual candidate is, and then the winning party unites and gets down to More ...

We’re well into year two of the Trump presidency, and well past the time when any lingering intramural hard feelings on the conservative side should’ve been smoothed over. That’s how it normally goes — egos get punctured in the primaries, expectations get modified based on who the actual candidate is, and then the winning party unites and gets down to governing.

Instead, assorted sub-groups within the conservative camp are going at each other like family members at the reading of Michael Jackson’s will. People who were ostensibly allies just a couple of years ago now only communicate through argument. And those arguments blow right through Reasonable Disagreement City on the express train to Contemptville, where sober debate is thin on the ground.

There’s very little “my reasonable colleague” this or “agree to disagree” that among the Republican factions. You’re either a Trumpkin throne-sniffer who will do anything to gain proximity to power, or a #NeverTrump charlatan who was never really conservative and never really wanted to win anything anyway.

I think it’s entirely possible that some people are less than truthful about their ideological allegiances or ethical standards or both… but not everybody. All the smart, principled conservatives didn’t suddenly become dumb and unprincipled just because of one election. Still, that seems to be the starting assumption of a lot of conservative commentary.

If you can avoid being distracted by the crisis du jour and look at the facts of the Trump presidency so far, it’s hard to deny that he’s done a lot of the things that conservatives traditionally wantpresidents to do. And while my math may not be entirely accurate, it’s also hard to deny that the policies of the Trump White House are about a million billion times better than the policies we would’ve gotten from the Hillary Clinton White House.

Trump’s opponents among the conservative commentariat never mention any of that, though. They hammer on Trump administration buffoonery, which, truth be told, is probably the pundit equivalent of popping a really long and satisfying sheet of bubble wrap. But the cabinet appointments? The judges? The regulatory rollback? Never heard of ’em.

This isn’t the first time a president has been less than popular with a large segment of his own party, but winning the presidency (which, I’m told, is one of the major goals of political parties) is usually enough to inspire at least the appearance of unity. Why is there still such division? I think the answer lies in a prison camp in Burma.

In the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, Alec Guiness plays Colonel Nicholson, the leader of a company of soldiers captured by the Japanese in World War II and forced to work as prison laborers on the titular bridge. Though a prisoner, Nicholson refuses to let his men be treated as slave labor. He insists on proper procedures and good military order in all things, and his endurance wins out over the sadistic prison camp commander. In the end, his men keep their dignity, but in so doing they build a better bridge for his enemy than they could’ve built themselves.

Nicholson is often used as a metaphor for people who thoughtlessly hurt their own cause by helping their opponents. Jonah Goldberg has used the reference himself a couple of times, once specifically to refer to people who supported Trump in the primaries.

But in the movie, Nicholson isn’t a bad guy. He’s an admirable guy. He stood for what he believed in the face of threats and abuse. He fought the battle that was in front of him and never gave in, and he won.

The problem was that the objective of Nicholson in his battle had diverged from the objective of others fighting the greater war. From where he stood, Nicholson saw victory in showing up his captors, demonstrating that the British character was better. That effort culminated in building a superior bridge. For the greater war effort, on the other hand, the objective was to blow that bridge up.

Trump has forced a divergence of goals. Many conservatives have devoted their lives to the twin pursuits of promoting moral leadership and winning elections, and before Trump, they felt they could pursue both those goals at once. But the rise of Trump split those goals in twain, like a weekend gambler splitting 7’s at the Trump Taj Mahal.

There is a class of conservative thought leaders who believe that to win is to demonstrate that the conservative character is better. When they attack Trump’s character flaws, they’re not betraying conservatism or trying to throw the match to the Democrats. They’re fighting the war that’s in front of them. They believe that maintaining the integrity of the Republican brand is ultimately the path to victory.

Meanwhile, there’s another group of conservatives who believe that they’ve been handed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to strap satchel charges to the pilings and blow the whole shebang sky-high. They’re willing, for the time being, to eschew moral victories (in both senses of the term) to gain victory victories.

I think the “Colonel Nicholson” label is applicable, but contra Jonah Goldberg, I think it applies more to Trump’s conservative detractors than his supporters. Both these groups want to advance conservative principles. But they define victory differently from each other now. So they grapple like people who aren’t on the same side, even though they are.

I don’t think that Colonel Nicholson conservatives will ever have a “What have I done?” moment, though, nor should they. It is good to have a faction within a party that can act as the party’s conscience, always pushing for higher standards of integrity and character. But sometimes you need commandos too. And it would be nice if the conscience of the party could take a break now and then to enjoy the sound of a good explosion.

]]>http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/05/colonel-nicholson-conservatives/feed/04296All the Mistakes That Had to be Madehttp://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/05/all-the-mistakes-that-had-to-be-made/
http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/05/all-the-mistakes-that-had-to-be-made/#respondTue, 08 May 2018 17:29:26 +0000http://www.jasonranderson.com/?p=4288There aren’t many places less comfortable, less restful, less conducive to healing than a hospital, at least not many allowed by the Geneva Convention. So, when my four-year-old daughter had to go into one for minor surgery recently, we expected an experience that was akin to being held captive overnight in a compound of obsessive/compulsive vampires who have an affinity More ...

]]>There aren’t many places less comfortable, less restful, less conducive to healing than a hospital, at least not many allowed by the Geneva Convention. So, when my four-year-old daughter had to go into one for minor surgery recently, we expected an experience that was akin to being held captive overnight in a compound of obsessive/compulsive vampires who have an affinity for modular furniture and overpriced vending machines.

Luckily for us, the good people at Children’s Hospital made is a lot more pleasant than that. It was still a little short of an all-inclusive resort vacation, but really, what can you expect for $10,000 a night? (Seriously, though, she came through it like a champ and was back to 100% by the Sunday after her Friday surgery, thanks in no small part to the skill of her doctors and nurses. It took longer for my wife and me to recover from sleeping overnight on a hospital couch than it too her to recover from actual surgery.)

But one thing I kept noticing throughout this process was the structure of the process itself — the way that hospitals run on requirements and rules and backups of backups. Everyone we encountered was operating within a well-defined framework that spelled out every step they had to take. I started noticing this around the fifth time someone asked us if our daughter was allergic to anything. Everybody had the same information about her, updated with what we’d told them in our last round of questions. But everybody asked anyway, because they had to ask. It was the process.

And it struck me that, much like the warning labels on hair dryers that say “Do not use in bathtub,” each of the steps in that process had been added as a corrective to some mistake that had happened in the past. A mistake that had probably led to grievous harm for somebody. So we, today, were blessed with layers of safety that had collected over years and years of learning from mistakes.

All the instructions that we heard over and over again, the stupid heart rate monitor alarm that kept going off in our room (because the settings were apparently for “hummingbird” rather than “sleeping 4-year-old girl”), and no telling how many required steps in the actual surgery. All there because mistake after mistake in the past had taught the hospital how not to do things.

And probably a lot of these rules, like a lot of other regulations we see, were overreactions or more structure than is really necessary (eventually I took the heart rate monitor off her finger and put it on mine so it would shut up; didn’t work). But each time we encountered part of the process, I couldn’t help but think about the people involved when that process wasn’t in place, and what might have happened to them, and how it wouldn’t happen to us because of what doctors learned from it.

Nobody hates overregulation more than me, but I appreciate that sometimes there can be good intentions behind it. And I’m thankful for the learning that comes from mistakes.

]]>http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/05/all-the-mistakes-that-had-to-be-made/feed/04288Adoption Nesting: Just Like Regular Nesting but with Less Nauseahttp://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/05/adoption-nesting-just-like-regular-nesting-less-nausea/
http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/05/adoption-nesting-just-like-regular-nesting-less-nausea/#respondSat, 05 May 2018 05:31:00 +0000http://www.jasonranderson.com/?p=4216We’re deep into the waiting period for our adoption, where all of the preliminary paperwork is finished and we’re biding our time until we’re matched with a baby. So, we’ve started to focus on all the things that you have to do to get your house and your family and your life ready to receive a new child. My wife More ...

]]>We’re deep into the waiting period for our adoption, where all of the preliminary paperwork is finished and we’re biding our time until we’re matched with a baby.

So, we’ve started to focus on all the things that you have to do to get your house and your family and your life ready to receive a new child. My wife especially is locked in on this. Every decision I make with her (at least the ones that have longer-lasting implications than where we park the car) is tinged with the subtext of “how will this affect the new baby?”

She’s acquired a big-girl bed for our daughter (age 4) to make the baby bed available, and she’s already looking to the schedule for the summer and fall to see how we might have to adjust work/school/familytime schedules.

But the most obvious effects of her efforts are the armloads of stuff I’m regularly hauling to the garage or the attic to make way for the presence of one additional human in the house. The bar for being able to keep stuff in our living spaces has risen remarkably high, to the point where the the kids are starting to hide toys that they want to keep from being “disappeared” into a Goodwill donation bin. Sometimes their little shoulders sag with resignation when they realize Mom has shaved down the toy population yet again, like a bankrupt rap producer watching the repo men haul off his tropical fish tank and mink bean bags.

And we’re using the newly available space to stock up on everything that can be stocked up at this point in the process: kid clothes, linens, some of the 72-odd different kinds of car seats that kids apparently have to use until they no longer qualify to be on their parents’ insurance in their mid-thirties.

It’s nesting. An age-old instinct that you expect out of parents-to-be. Except usually it happens when one of the parents is pregnant. And you assume that it’s caused mostly by biological triggers — hormones and complex chemical reactions that have evolved over the eons to make us do what our children need.

Only that’s not the case here. There’s no biology to it. Just a couple of people who know that there’s a baby coming sometime in the near future.

Funny how my wife has the same instincts, and I have the same sympathetic instincts, both when her reproductive system is flooding her body with hormones and when it’s not. It’s almost like humans aren’t just a collection of chemicals and evolved responses.

We’re more than that. Our instincts to love and provide for children aren’t just biology. They’re an outgrowth of a spiritual truth. Love has a source that’s not physical. It’s an overflowing from a Father who loves us.

]]>http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/05/adoption-nesting-just-like-regular-nesting-less-nausea/feed/04216Stripping with Stormy Danielshttp://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/04/stripping-stormy-daniels/
http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/04/stripping-stormy-daniels/#respondMon, 09 Apr 2018 02:26:01 +0000http://www.jasonranderson.com/?p=4265The reason people can box for sport and exercise is that everybody agrees to a set of time-honored rules beforehand. Because of those rules, sparring can look like fighting, but it’s not really a fight because the participants aren’t trying to hurt or kill each other. So, everybody can get in shape and hone their skills without fearing for their More ...

]]>The reason people can box for sport and exercise is that everybody agrees to a set of time-honored rules beforehand. Because of those rules, sparring can look like fighting, but it’s not really a fight because the participants aren’t trying to hurt or kill each other. So, everybody can get in shape and hone their skills without fearing for their lives. It’s the very picture of civilized conflict.

But let’s say one of the boxers decided he was going to start ignoring those rules — like, he started hitting below the belt or brought a brick or a knife into the ring with him — because he didn’t want everybody to get a good workout, he just wanted to win. That would change the complexion of the encounter.

It would be a great situation for the guy with the brick, as long as the other boxer was committed to upholding Marquess of Queensberry rules. He’d have free run of the ring and could do whatever he wanted. If his opponent really wanted to play by the rules, his only options would be to get his head caved in or flee the ring.

So then let’s say that the boxer with the brick, drunk with his success, decided to chase his opponent out into the parking lot and continue beating him with the brick, and then he showed up at his opponent’s job at the car dealership and jumped on top of his desk and continued to beat him with the brick, and then he chased him to his house… and so on and so on.

No matter how much the other boxer wanted to uphold the civilized rules, eventually, for the sake of self-preservation, he would have to start fighting back in kind. He would have to find his own bat or chainsaw or wild badger and use it against his attacker. When that finally happened, the first boxer, the one with the brick, might try to call him out for cheating. But his complaint would be absurd. A man can only take a beating for so long before he decides that civility is less important than keeping all the blood inside his body.

For a long time, leftist activists in America have been fighting without regard for the rules of civilized political conflict. More recently, they’ve stopped even being subtle about it. Anybody who doesn’t buy into liberal groupthink is subject to relentless, vicious, no-holds-barred attack. It doesn’t even matter if you’re just a regular civilian with no real influence of governmental power. If the left thinks they can make an example of you, they have no mercy.

This works out great for them as long as the other side isn’t willing to respond in kind. They can spend the day rioting to shut down a conservative speaker on a college campus and then grab a chalupa at Taco Bell and walk home safely, because they know that there’s not a mob of people on the other side who are going to track them down through their Facebook accounts and spend all night blowing air horns in their yards and throwing garbage through their windows. They can organize campaigns to get people with the wrong opinions fired and still feel secure in their own jobs. They can gin up scandals over the bad behavior of the opposition and, since they don’t care about their own bad behavior, never have to worry about retaliation.

But what if the other side, tired after decades of being kicked in the junk, decides that they don’t care about bad behavior either? Because that’s where we are now.

It’s been remarkable watching the whole Stormy Daniels episode play out. The press so desperately wanted it to be a scandal. It certainly had all the earmarks of a good one — the illicit sex to get people interested and the hush money angle to give it a sinister vibe. In the past, this kind of thing was enough to, if not end, at least cripple a presidency. A significant percentage of the Republican base wouldn’t tolerate this kind of moral failing in a political leader, and they would turn against him.

Not anymore. Exactly zero people who supported Trump before will change their minds because of Stormy Daniels. Nobody’s even surprised by this.

And I can only imagine what’s going through the heads of reporters as they continue to pursue these stories. “Hey, this kind of stuff used to work,” they think, as they despondently scratch their heads with their “I’m With Hillary!” commemorative pens and sip stale coffee out of their DNC Platinum Level Donor coffee mugs. “Why aren’t people reacting to these stories anymore?”

I don’t know if they’ll figure it out (probably not), but the reason seems pretty obvious: people have been beaten with bricks for so long that they are now willing to sacrifice moral standards for the sake of a win. Like a river erodes its banks, the ruthless, relentless push of leftism into every aspect of life has stripped away the civility from its victims.

We can only have an orderly society if most of the people care about the society, and the rules that keep it orderly, more than they care about winning political power. But once everybody gives up on order and winning at all costs becomes the norm — once all the Marquess of Queensberry rules have been stripped away — you don’t have a society at all. You just have warring factions grasping for power.

]]>http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/04/stripping-stormy-daniels/feed/04265Forgiveness v. Celebrationhttp://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/03/forgiveness-v-celebration/
http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/03/forgiveness-v-celebration/#respondFri, 16 Mar 2018 03:49:28 +0000http://www.jasonranderson.com/?p=4249Goodness knows, I don’t want to seem like a jerk, and I’m all about forgiveness and second chances and all that stuff. But can someone explain to me why we’re all supposed to be rooting for Tiger Woods now? I’m a golf fan, so I’ve been watching sports media this season as Tiger has edged his way ever closer to More ...

Goodness knows, I don’t want to seem like a jerk, and I’m all about forgiveness and second chances and all that stuff. But can someone explain to me why we’re all supposed to be rooting for Tiger Woods now?

I’m a golf fan, so I’ve been watching sports media this season as Tiger has edged his way ever closer to being a significant force in the world of golf again. I would say that their coverage has the slobbering, moon-eyed quality of a Seventeen magazine profile of Justin Bieber, except that would be an insult to both Seventeen and Justin Bieber.

They’re clearly desperate for Tiger to be successful and popular again. Everybody who makes money from golf remembers the last time Tiger was successful and popular, and they were making a whole bunch of money back then. So, their attitude is understandable. But their assumption is that everybody else should be just as excited as they are about the prospect of Tiger’s re-ascendance. And you know what they say about assuming: “When you assume, it makes Tiger Woods a jackass.”

Because as far as I can tell, Tiger is exactly the same person he was before his self-immolation, and that’s not the kind of person I’m inclined to root for. If there had been some kind of change of heart in there somewhere, I could understand the celebration — y’know, a “guy shakes off his demons” kind of thing. But I haven’t seen it.

What I have seen is a guy who was really good at golf getting good at golf again. And that’s great; I’m not mad at Tiger Woods nor at the TV networks for wanting Tiger’s star power back on the course and in contention.

But it’s one thing to accept someone who’s made a fool of himself and everyone around him; it’s quite another to celebrate that person as a hero for putting out a fire that he set himself. Especially when the fire was on his own pants.

So if Tiger is back to his old form, that’s fine and dandy. But there are lots of other people who play golf, so I’ll be watching those other guys too.

]]>http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/03/forgiveness-v-celebration/feed/04249Thoughts and Prayers and Materialismhttp://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/02/thoughts-prayers-materialism/
http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/02/thoughts-prayers-materialism/#respondTue, 27 Feb 2018 05:43:09 +0000http://www.jasonranderson.com/?p=4102In the wake of the Parkland, FL school shooting, there’s been lots of anger and vitriol, including some people engaging in America’s hottest new pastime: making fun of religious people. It seems like people are now waiting to pounce on the first person to offer “thoughts and prayers” after a tragedy, and pounce they did after Parkland, taking to Twitter More ...

]]>In the wake of the Parkland, FL school shooting, there’s been lots of anger and vitriol, including some people engaging in America’s hottest new pastime: making fun of religious people.

It seems like people are now waiting to pounce on the first person to offer “thoughts and prayers” after a tragedy, and pounce they did after Parkland, taking to Twitter with the hashtag #ThoughtsAndPrayersDoNothing.

To the left, public calls for “thoughts and prayers,” especially those coming from NRA supporters or Republican politicians, are dangerous because they serve as a cheap “cop out” from the hard work of actually reducing gun violence in America.

It’s understandable that Americans want solutions to mass shootings. No one should be satisfied with what happened in Parkland, Florida. No one should willingly embrace mass shootings as the norm. But it’s deeply unfortunate that in our search for solutions, we have turned on each other. Ridiculing prayer as well as people of faith does nothing to make our kids and our communities safer.

As a pastor, I find it both frustrating and heart-breaking that faith-minded Americans are now increasingly under attack when they dare to express their faith on social media, in their communities, or in the public square. This is, after all, the United States of America…

The author then goes on to talk about the prominent place of Judeo-Christian religion in American life and history, arguing for the existence of God and the value of prayer. I appreciate the effort, and I certainly agree with the points he makes, but I feel like his approach is a bit of a misdiagnosis of the problem.

Prayer is primarily a spiritual activity with primarily spiritual results. We used to live in a culture that placed a high value on spiritual things like faith and hope, perseverance and patience. But we now live in a highly materialistic culture that has no regard for anything that can’t be seen and inventoried and consumed, or otherwise folded up and put in your pocket.

People feel comfortable ridiculing prayer now because they can’t physically see its results. And the culture, largely, backs them up on this. History and tradition are fine and all, but what have you done for me lately?

Offering prayers for someone after a tragic event is meant to fortify that person’s soul, to bless them with inner strength and peace. But that blessing doesn’t come with dollar bills raining from the sky, or a bunch of new Instagram followers, or a new law that I can wave in somebody’s face and take credit for passing. So, therefore, prayer must be worthless.

It’s hard to convince people of the value of prayer when they don’t even believe in the spiritual realm where prayer exists. It’s like trying to educate people about food when they don’t believe in the stomach.

And as always, if there’s any takeaway I want you to get out of this post, it’s “Stay away from Twitter.” Because Twitter is a terrible place.

]]>http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/02/thoughts-prayers-materialism/feed/04102Stumble Through the Bible – Episode 2: Vengence!http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/02/stumble-bible-episode-2-vengence/
http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/02/stumble-bible-episode-2-vengence/#commentsWed, 07 Feb 2018 04:31:41 +0000http://www.jasonranderson.com/?p=4203In episode 2, we look at the relationship between the story of Daniel in the lion’s den and one of the all-time great Nicholas Cage paycheck movies, Con Air. As always, if you have thoughts of your own on this passage, or ideas for future stumbling, I’d love to read about it in the comments.

]]>http://www.jasonranderson.com/2018/02/stumble-bible-episode-2-vengence/feed/1In episode 2, we look at the relationship between the story of Daniel in the lion’s den and one of the all-time great Nicholas Cage paycheck movies, Con Air. As always, if you have thoughts of your own on this passage, or ideas for future stumbling,
As always, if you have thoughts of your own on this passage, or ideas for future stumbling, I’d love to read about it in the comments.]]>jason (r) anderson8:244203